Dance to the Music...

Let’s dance our way through the pandemic…dancing to the music of Kingsport’s two seminal rock era dance bands, the Scat Cats and the Monzas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPW9PEueMfM

First The Scat Cats performing “Something Is Wrong with My Baby” from their only album, a self-produced CD of a live performance from 1994.(The CD was released in 2010 and is hard to find.)

Now The Monzas performing their most famous song, “Stubborn Kinda Fellow”    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S54zMEnYOvw

Now for a little history lesson about each band.

I moved back to Kingsport in the summer of 2002 and began writing a column for the Kingsport Times News that December.

I knew one of the first things I wanted to write about was the Scat Cats, the first local band I think I ever saw.

My high school biology lab partner Johnny King, who had moved back to town a few years earlier, got me the phone number for the Scat Cats drummer Donnie Flack.

In February 2003 I met Donnie in the parking lot of the Garden Basket, or what had once been the Garden Basket, and we sat on the hood of my car and talked for a good hour about the band he had played in for the past, at that time, forty years. Donnie brought along some handwritten notes about the band’s history. I supplemented that with a few clippings I dug out of the Times News archive and wrote my first column about the Scat Cats in February 2003.

The first mention of the group was a September 1958 ad in the Times News for a dance at the Civic Auditorium featuring “Sunny Sanders and the Scat Cats.”

The classified noted only three members: “vocalizing Sunny Sanders, Joe Manuel and Carolyn Rock.”

A couple of years later the Flack brothers, Donnie and Arthur, joined along with singer Kenny Springs.  

Donnie told me that in the early years, “We didn’t do a thing but play places in town. The Rollerdrome, I think it was called, this skating rink downtown. East Tennessee State, all the colleges, just about every high school. We did a lot of proms, VFW, Elks, the Teen Center we played quite a bit. I can’t think of a place we didn’t play.”

Donnie says that after the first year, “Then things really broke loose.”

After they opened for Ray Charles in Knoxville, a booking agent put together a two-week tour of the south with Johnny Nash, Lightning Hopkins and the Scat Cats. Donnie recalls, “The other guys were a lot older. Me and Arthur were playing in night clubs and we weren’t even supposed to be in night clubs.”

The tour wound up in Miami but Donnie says it was such a success “they did not want us to come home. We just had our pick of places to play.”

And they picked the Mary Elizabeth, a luxury hotel once famous in the jazz world for hosting Cab Calloway, Count Basie and Lena Horne. “Our club was open all day and all night and we did the night bar. This place drew everybody. All the stars and the performers came in after their shows.”

The Scat Cats were living high.

“There were these two guys lived on the top floor, singers. They were just starting. They didn’t have any records. When they would come back in from their shows, they could not wait to get on stage and sing with us. They had this little short bow-legged guy for a manager. ‘These guys need a good band,’ he told us. ‘They like you all; you’d make a good team.’ But the club owners told us to leave him alone, he was the biggest crook in town.”

So the Scat Cats turned the two singers down and returned to Kingsport. “It was about six months later they came to Johnson City to the Armory. We went to see them, me and my brother and Sonny to catch the show.”

The two guys the Scat Cats knew from Miami started their show off with “Soul Man,” followed it with “Hold On I’m Coming,” then continued with the rest of their hits.

“It was Sam and Dave. They seen us and they died laughing. They said, ‘We told you.’ Here we were back home not making any money and they had five or six hits. And that little bow-legged guy was still managing them. We made a mistake. We could have been their band. I told my brother we did a good one. We had a booking agent and they just told you where to go. If we’d had a manager, we probably would have been hooked up with them.”

But it wasn’t over for the Scat Cats. They kept playing in the area.

In the early seventies the Scat Cats traveled to Nashville for a recording session with Columbia Records. By now Manuel had left the group and Kenny Springs was singing lead. “Floyd Cramer and Chet Atkins sat in on the recording,” Flack recalled. The result was the single “Walking in the Rain” and it was a pick hit in Billboard, landing the Scat Cats bookings up and down the east coast. They later recorded for Spot Records under the name Kenny Springs and the Scat Cats, releasing “Nobody Else But You” backed by “Let Nobody Love You.”

But bookings fell off, life went on. The Scat Cats stayed in touch.

Joe Manuel moved to Oakland, California and opened a package store. “He got shot and killed when some guys robbed him,” says Flack.

Sonny Sanders moved to Ohio. “He   had an accident working in a factory so he can’t play guitar anymore.”

Kenny Springs “had a son, Kenny Junior, they call him Scat. He’s got a band down in Nashville doing commercials. He sings just like his dad.”

Donnie and Arthur remained in Kingsport.

The Scat Cats story got back together in 2002: Donnie, Arthur, Kenny. “And we’ve added the Wells Brothers from Bluff City.”

The group played local gigs for five or so years.

What happened to all the members of The Scat Cats?

Joe Manuel died in 1976. In high school at Douglass he had been voted Most Popular, Best Looking and Best All Around. He was student director of the 40-voice Douglass Choral Club. He was also a basketball and football star.

Arthur Flack died in 2006. 

Kenny Springs died in 2007. His son, known as Scat Springs, became a recording artist in Nashville. And Scat’s daughter Kandace Springs is also a singer.  She appeared on the David Letterman show in 2014. She records for the legendary jazz label Blue Note.

Charles “Sonny” Sanders passed away in 2017 in Toledo, Ohio.

I still see Donnie around town.

And now The Monzas…

Around the same time the Scat Cats were getting going, another local band was also playing the Rollerdrome/prom/frat party circuit, the Monzas.

Jerry McIntosh once recounted for me the beginnings in early 1962. “Jack Ferrell and I had been classmates since fourth grade. We were in Chorus together back when it took a lot of guts to be a guy in Chorus. Jack and I were in Madrigals together. We were roommates at ETSU.”

The two were playing around in a practice room at ETSU. “Al Wilkes came up and said he wanted to put a band together.”

Jerry and Jack were already performing with Jerry Ervin in a group tentatively called the Three J’s so they included Ervin in their new band.

“I’m the Pete Best of the Monzas,” said Ervin, a reference to the original drummer in the Beatles who dropped out before they became famous. “I had to move on. The military called.”

But they kept adding members – and subtracting one, when Ervin joined the service – until they were seven strong. They needed a new name – they weren’t just three J’s now - and they got that from drummer Phil Mullins who had a Chevy Monza. “All the other car names were taken,” said McIntosh.

 And thus was born The Monzas.

The first lineup also included Bobby Cooper, Jim Lane and Mullins.

Ervin remembered, “We first played in the D.E. room at Dobyns-Bennett. Then later we played a Coke Party at the State Theater.”

And then Ervin left. And at first that didn’t seem like such a bad move. In the early days The Monzas were not exactly flush with success. “We had to play in places with upright pianos with cigarette burns,” recalled McIntosh. “We used homemade amps. Our PA was a Rockola jukebox. We were playing a frat party at Georgia and one of the frat guys saw the Rockola amp and said, ‘What’s the name of this seedy band?’”

But slowly things started picking up. They went from playing proms and Teen Center dances to gigs at The Spot on the Gate City-Hiltons Road and on to engagements at Daytona Beach, Myrtle Beach and colleges all over the south.

They even got to open for Jerry Lee Lewis. Another late era Monza, Danny Lewis, remembered, “He had a quart of whisky and an iced tea glass. He poured a drink, then poured another. He walked out on stage with that same glass full. He threw the bottle away, sipped the drink, played a few chords, then stood up, kicked the stool back and became the Killer.”

Lewis described himself as “The Last Monza.” “A year or so after I joined the Monzas, we changed our name.”

In later years the lineup included various and sundry combinations of the original seven as well as Bob Lewis, Denny Coffey, David Riggs, David Roberts, Tom Richmond, Roland Boles and Danny Lewis. There were also two girl singers over the years, Brenda Seal and Kathy Bell.

The late great Al Wilkes, who was my homeroom teacher and my basketball coach at D-B, told me there were two highlights in the Monzas hey-day: “We were a Pick to Click three straight weeks on WLS (the rock radio giant in Chicago) and in 1965, when ‘Hang On Sloopy’ was number two at the beach, our recording of ‘Stubborn Kinda Fellow’ was number one.”

More music...

The Scat Cats sing "Nobody Else But You." Click here.

The Monzas sing "You Know You Turn Me On." Click here.